Nietzsche: Overman

For many, striving to attain first place in an athletic competition is explicable. Less explicable is striving to attain first place in a virtue (aretē) competition. Yet this latter dynamic appears in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. There is 4.3’s magnanimity, the crown of the virtues, which seemingly manifests itself in outdoing one’s peers in virtue. Such one-upmanship also seems operant with 9.8’s praiseworthy self-lover, who seeks to get as much of the fine (to kalon) as possible for herself. Contrary to many (...) interpreters, this paper argues that praiseworthy self-love and magnanimity involve one-upmanship. The relevant exemplars are not simply striving to be the best that they can be in respect to virtue (in virtuous activity), but to be better than others. The paper argues that Aristotle’s axiology, which sets activity (energeia) above state (hexis) and potentiality (dunamis), engenders one-upmanship. For only the level of activity substantially differentiates individuals, settling for inferiority is obviously objectionable, and equal achievement for Aristotle is not static but involves matching and surpassing the achievements of others. The paper concludes that modern discomfort with these dynamics is due to an axiology Nietzsche attributes to Christianity, one that bases human value fundamentally on non-differentiating potentiality. (shrink)

ISBN 978-1-4384-9027-4 Argues that Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch was a central concern of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s. -/- Nietzsche in Hollywood offers a compelling and startling history of Hollywood film in which the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of the Übermensch looms large. Though Nietzsche’s philosophy was attacked as egoistic and a sociopathic version of Darwinism in films from the 1910s, it undergoes a series of cinematic and philosophical transformations in the 1920s and 1930s under (...) the eye and pen of some of the most significant names in early Hollywood, including Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Ben Hecht, Howard Hawks, and Ernst Lubitsch. In addition to establishing historical connections between Nietzsche’s philosophy and these filmmakers, the book provides philosophical readings of many Hollywood films through the lens of the Nietzschean ideas of “perspectivism” and the critique of morality. Offering a new history of classic Hollywood films as well as a new approach to film philosophy, Nietzsche in Hollywood reveals a reading of the philosopher in American culture that has largely been ignored. (shrink)

The critique of Metaphysics and Morality occupies a central place in post-modern philosophy. The decline and decadence of absolute truths about the true nature of reality, was presented by radical changes in scientific progress. Nietzsche’s proclamation of the Death of God will be set as the starting point for the critique and personal reflection. Nietzsche’s new conception of man, breaks off from traditional understanding, inherited from the pre-Socratics. Nietzsche is not a post-modern philosopher who is against morality, but rather opposed (...) to the traditional way of moral evaluations, which have historically been based on different metaphysical models that presupposes a world replete of universal truths. This work deals with the proposition given on the impossibility of morals based on transcendental truths given a stronger version of Nietzsche‘s Will to Power and the implication of such findings on the most practical aspects of our daily lives and future moral evaluations. (shrink)

El artículo analiza desde una perspectiva crítica las tentativas de interpretar a Nietzsche como un precursor del transhumanismo. Tras una breve contextualización del fecundo debate en torno a Nietzsche y el transhumanismo, se evalúa el carácter fraccional o parcial del alegato de Stefan Sorgner en favor de un “transhumanismo nietzscheano”. Después, se investiga la tensión entre humanidad, la superación del ser humano y su cría en los escritos de Nietzsche. Una vez ejecutado este análisis, y sin ánimo de caer en (...) el anacronismo, se sostiene que Nietzsche anticipa ciertamente un germen de la idea de post-humanidad, en su crítica de la cultura humanista y en su invitación a transformar el ser humano y superar el nihilismo, pero no asimilable a la vertiente tecnológica del transhumanismo. Para concluir, se sugiere una prospectiva de análisis del transhumanismo desde una perspectiva nietzscheana, tomando como ejemplo la imagen de las “sombras de Dios”. (shrink)

Tournaments have been a good way to promote and market the martial art of Karate. However, there seems to be a growing phenomenon in these tournaments as some spectators have begun to neglect the proper attitude and values in watching and accepting the results in competitions. Many spectators seem to be concerned only with their favorites and the success that these competitors achieve. Unfavorable results towards the players they support have often led to undue criticisms and protests against tournament officials (...) and organizers. In this paper, the authors will hope to present that a good understanding and sincere appreciation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Ubermensch and Immanuel Kant’s deontology could serve as a guide to help spectators adopt the proper values in accepting the outcome and results of Karate competitions. The authors believe that these concepts, if properly understood, could possibly lead to a change in spectator attitudes that may help in preserving the integrity of tournaments and contribute in promoting a competitive yet harmonious atmosphere in these Karate contests. (shrink)

In this paper, I take it to be uncontroversial that increasingly into his philosophical career, Nietzsche believed human greatness to be an appropriately valuable goal, at least for certain types of people. But while Nietzsche's repeated paradigms of greatness include figures as seemingly diverse as Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cesare Borgia, Julius Caesar, it is unclear precisely what great-making property (or properties) Nietzsche considers these figures to share. I consider two possible approaches which have shaped the terrain of the secondary literature (...) on this controversial matter: greatness as a matter of internal properties (character traits); or external properties (achievements). I discuss the arguments for each view here, resulting with my own view being that both achievements and traits of character are at least necessary for what Nietzsche understands greatness to consist in. I then consider a distinction between actual and potential greatness in order to explore further necessary and perhaps sufficient conditions of Nietzsche's positive ideal. While my aim in this paper is primarily exegetical, I hope to draw upon contemporary issues in value theory surrounding the nature of achievement which are of interest to ethicists more broadly. (shrink)

Both for Kant and for Nietzsche, aesthetics must not be considered as a systematic science based merely on logical premises but rather as a set of intuitively attained artistic ideas that constitute or reconstitute the sensible perceptions and supersensible representations into a new whole. Kantian and Nietzschean aesthetics are both aiming to see beyond the forms of objects to provide explanations for the nobility and sublimity of human art and life. We can safely say that Kant and Nietzsche used the (...) dualities of the beautiful/sublime and Apollonian/Dionysian to advocate their general philosophical worldview, and that the initial formation (in Observations and The Birth of Tragedy) and final dissolution (in the Critique of Judgment and Zarathustra and other later works) of these dualities are determined by the gradually established telos of their philosophical endeavor. Therefore, by observing the evolution of these so-called dualities, Kaplama gathers important clues as to how Kant’s and Nietzsche’s aesthetics transformed into different ways to affirm human art and life. On the one hand, Kaplama argues, the Dionysian came to be the heart and soul of Nietzschean aesthetics and ethics, and the Apollonian (or the formal drive of individuation) was reduced into a mere aesthetic criterion. On the other, Kant treats the sublime (which is originally an idea-producing feeling and/or judgment) as a mere appendix to his Critique of Judgment and aesthetic theory teleologically reducing it into its possible moral consequences. This is why Schopenhauer calls the sublime “by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Judgment” which touches on the real problem of aesthetics very closely but does not provide a real solution for it. Kant’s forced teleological move is to make his theory of aesthetic judgment stand as a ‘reaffirmation’ of the earlier ethical justification he believed to have accomplished in the first two Critiques and the Groundwork where he defends an affirmation of human life through a teleological morality centered on the principle of free-will. In contrast, Nietzsche’s aesthetics (particularly the Dionysian) guides his ethics and metaphysics again through defining an ideal human nature without which ethos would be static and meaningless, lacking the ability to move and change and represent the tragic pathos of human life. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 231-266. -/- Abstract: In this essay I defend my interpretation of the unheard words that Zarathustra whispers into Life’s ear in “The Other Dance Song” and that have long kept commentators puzzled. I argue that what Zarathustra whispers is that he knows that Life is pregnant with his child. Zarathustra’s ability to make Life pregnant depends on his overcoming of Eternal Recurrence which threatens to strangle him with disgust of human beings (...) and all of existence, thereby making him into a spiritual eunuch whose will has turned into not-willing. The insemination of Life is a transfiguring act that raises Life from her blind animality (or materiality) into the level of a spiritually fertile existence, which is the condition of human freedom. This act is performed with the help of our capacity for theoretical knowledge, which is why it requires love of Wisdom. However, love of Wisdom can make us infertile, and thus unfree, when pursued for its own sake (knowledge can choke). I conclude by considering who might be the child of Zarathustra and Life. -/- Zusammenfassung: In diesem Aufsatz verteidige ich meine Interpretation der unhörbaren Wörter, die Zarathustra in „Das andere Tanzlied“ in das Ohr des Lebens flüstert und seit langem Kommentatoren ratlos machen. Was Zarathustra flüstert, ist, so meine These, dass er weiß, dass das Leben mit seinem Kind schwanger ist. Zarathustras Fähigkeit, das Leben zu schwängern, hängt von seiner Überwindung des Gedankens der ewigen Wiederkehr ab, der ihn durch den Überdruss am Menschen und an allem Dasein zu erwürgen bedroht und ihn dabei zu einem spirituellen Eunuchen macht, dessen Wollen zum Nicht-Wollen geworden ist. Die Befruchtung des Lebens ist eine umgestaltende Tat, die das Leben von seiner blinden Tiernatur (oder Stofflichkeit) auf die Ebene eines spirituell fruchtbaren Daseins erhebt, was die Voraussetzung menschlicher Freiheit ist. Dieser Akt wird mit Hilfe unserer Fähigkeit zu theoretischem Wissen ausgeführt, weshalb er Liebe zur Weisheit erfordert. Liebe zur Weisheit kann uns jedoch unfruchtbar und damit unfrei machen, wenn sie um ihrer selbst willen verfolgt wird (Wissen kann ersticken). Ich schließe mit der Überlegung ab, wer Zarathustras und des Lebens Kind sein könnte. (shrink)

-/- This paper offers a preliminary interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, according to which the doctrine constitutes a parable that, speaking of what is permanent in life, praises and justifies all that is impermanent. What is permanent, what always recurs, is the will to power or to self-overcoming that is the fundamental engine of all life. The operating mechanism of such a will consists in prompting the living to undergo transformations or transitory deaths, after which this fundamental engine (...) resurrects again and is once more activated. The individual human being, in his capacity as creator, is only a conscious and finite surrogate of this fundamental will. In confronting his abysmal thought of Eternal Recurrence, Zarathustra comes to the realization that the individual human being will never cease to be a mere transit that, while remaining in existence, will have to always return to the moment of his own self-overcoming. This means that the small man in each of us, the man that can be overcome, will always recur, and that even the greatest man we could become will still be too small and human all too human. Although this thought generates disgust with existence, it can also become a source of life-affirmation, when we learn to love our tragic destiny: that of never being able to realize the ideal of superhumanity that is recommended by the book, and, yet, that of eternally striving to realize it. (shrink)

The hermeneutic thicket surrounding the question of Nietzsche and the Greeks is both dense and forbidding. Every attempt to pose this question confronts a wide range of difficult issues. Who is “Nietzsche”? Which “Greeks”? What range of concerns? methods? disciplinary boundaries? How to think the relation between the early Nietzsche of the Basel years and the later Nietzsche post-Zarathustra? Where to turn for help in working through the palimpsest of interpretations that have formed the Nietzschebild in our time? To simply (...) raise such questions proves inadequate, of course, to the task of effecting a shift in the way Nietzsche scholars approach this topic. There is little consensus on what “the” Greeks mean for .. (shrink)

This paper is founded on a close reading of Kant’s Opus Postumum in order both to explore the essential motivation that drove Kant to write a last comprehensive magnum opus and, by doing so, to show the essential link between his aesthetics and the idea of Übergang, the title of this last work. For this work contains not only his dynamical theory of matter defining motion as preliminary to the notions of space and time, and the advanced version of his (...) philosophy of natural science, but also his arguments for the phenomenal validity of the metaphysical foundations, his teachings on the aesthetic human faculties of judgment and Anschauung, and the discernment of the transcendental philosophy from Platonic idealism carrying it to a cosmological level, i.e. Kant’s insertion of the concept of cosmotheoros. Since the process of transition is an aesthetic process based on human senses, intuitions and judgments, the argument will follow that in order to explicate Übergang, we need to reconcile cosmology, as the oldest branch of philosophy dealing with the interactions between the cosmic forces and the ways they affect human life, with aesthetics, as the youngest branch of philosophy dealing with how we sense, intuit and judge the form and motion of matter. Therefore, in the last analysis, Übergang becomes rather a cosmologic-aesthetic principle similar to the Heraclitean logos. Another building block of the paper is the fruitful comparison between the Kantian sublime and Nietzschean Dionysian, which are going to be construed as the aesthetic theories on human understanding representing the transition from nature to art. For they are not only conceptual – aesthetic but also dynamic – cosmological theories due to their reference both to nature and to human nature. (shrink)

Dans son essai, Christine Daigle établit en quoi les philosophies de Nietzsche et Sartre convergent ou divergent en ce qui a trait à la problématique du nihilisme, à la quête de sens et à l'éthique.

Nietzsche's vision of the 'overman' continues to haunt the postmodern imagination. His call that 'man is something that must be overcome' can no longer be seen as simple rhetoric. Our experiences of the hybrid realities of artificial life have made the 'transhuman' a figure that looks over us all. Inspired by this vision, Keith Ansell Pearson sets out to examine if evolution is 'out of control' and machines are taking over. In a series of six fascinating perspectives, he links Nietzsche's (...) thought with the issues at stake in contemporary conceptions of evolution from the biological to the technological. _Viroid Life; Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition_ considers the hybrid, 'inhuman' character of our future with the aid of Nietzsche's philosophy. Keith Ansell Pearson contrasts Nietzsche and Darwin before introducing the more recent figures such as Giles Deleuze and Guy Debord to sketch a new thinking of technics and machines and stress the ambiguous character of our 'machine enslavement'. (shrink)

This article is a summation of work devoted to the main themes of Heidegger's and Nietzsche's philosophies. Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzscheanism and his evaluation of it prompt one make a more precise analysis of the relationship which hypothetically should exist between the "essential thought" of the two philosophers. A comparative analysis of the "essential" themes of the two philosophers shows, however, that questions which were undoubtedly most essential for Nietzsche are compeltely outside the area definied in Heidegger's philosophy as "essential (...) thought", while very many elements of Nietzsche's thought indicate that it is not "essential" philosophy in Heidegger's understanding. (shrink)